This page was updated 11/19/2007

There are two categories people—at least two—that I worry about in our American society today. The first is made up of those people who are concerned primarily that they shall be saved in the next world, who don’t believe in the open encounter, who think that faith is just for the other world, who have no interest in charity, or politics, or social reform.

Faith is supposed to produce good works. We must improve our community and our world, all the time, in every way possible. No town in this country, or anywhere else, is yet good enough to hopeless or beyond improvement. No church, no business, is good enough or beyond improvement. Even character is part of our good works. We are not saved by faith, and our civilization is not save by faith, without character. Character is not achieved in a vacuum. It means human relationships, and daily duties, and honesty, and responsibilities, and doing our best, wherever we can. Faith without character, faith without works, is dead.

May the warmth of the fellowship we share this morning be with us through this coming week. May we draw strength from the faith we hold. May we prove our faith by extending our love and tolerance to those whose ideas and values may be different from ours. And may we find strength in humility, courage in adversity, joy in diversity, and a true sense of purpose in our prayers.

As the deer pants for cooling streams, we too seek the clear waters of life.

And so, in the coming week, may our ears be open to tidings of joy and gladness. May there not arise in the heart of anyone, envy of us; nor in us, envy of anyone.

O God of mercy and love, bless and prosper the work of our hands,

for our life,

and for your kingdom,

AMEN.

I am a deeply religious person. I have combined a set of beliefs with an attitude about life and the universe that I feel is coherent with the many expressions of religion throughout human history. Not all UUs, and not all of you in this congregation, share this same deep sense of religion, and this is a constant source of wonder and confusion for me. I do not want to force you, or anyone, to be religious. Surely, one central tenet of our religious heritage is the recognition that one cannot be forced to hold to a religion and still have that religion remain honest and effective. So I find myself trying other methods of developing the sense of religion within the congregation.

This becomes very difficult in an environment like greater Fort Wayne, where religion is automatically associated with God. Speaking rigorously intellectually, I am an agnostic. That is, I have not found adequate knowledge of God's existence or attributes, and I doubt such knowledge will ever be available to humanity. I am speaking here of any particular idea of God or theological dogma. We suffer from an abundance of riches when it comes to notions of the divine, and it seems impossible to me to pick just one.

I know that, for all intents and purposes in this part of the country, this means that I am an atheist; for it is altogether too clear to many people that I do not believe in the popular notions of God. Indeed, I find them intellectually dishonest, ethically inadequate, and spiritually bankrupt. At least, in this sense I agree with a number of you, I even go so far as to say (hopefully) the majority of you. Yet, not agreeing with the majority is not quite the same thing as having no opinion. Like most UUs, I am filled with opinions of varying quality and intensity – even about God and faith.

My purpose is not quibble over the differences between atheism and agnosticism. Rather than argue about God, I will present what I hope is a helpful framework for religious thought. This seems to fit the liberal heritage, which demands of each of you a personal commitment and decision-making process. As Clinton Lee Scott's Parish Parables says, the church does not exist to throw life jackets, but to teach you how to swim; not where, just how.

I seldom talk about God, for there is really little to say, and poets and mystics say it better than theologians and ministers anyway. I do try to bring you some of their words, but frankly, my sermons are not poetic (something a few of you apparently have noticed). For me God is not the most important focus of religion. It doesn’t really make much sense, after all, to consider God important if there is little one can know about the subject.

Religion is not concerned about God so much as it is concerned about faith. Faith, always a key word, generally gets lost in talk about faith in a particular God, always a dead end. This is unfortunate, but another problem is even worse: faith is said to be something one has when one doesn't know better--a belief in things one cannot know. This definition is fatally flawed, and I am going to try to redeem faith for you this morning.

In order to accomplish this, I will talk about knowledge and love. Now, I enjoy no delusions about these terms, which are inadequate, as are all terms, to capture the concept of faith. There are many other terms, some fit for academic discussion, others appropriate for particular religions, and some more popular. But I shall use these two, knowledge and love, recognizing that even these terms can be controversial and confusing.

2. A rough definition

Let me begin with a simple definition of faith to get us started. Faith is the basis of one's world-view, of one's dreams and actions. It is foundational: it underlies an approach to the world and to reality as one envisions them. Certain popular dichotomies seem at first appropriate to the discussion: realistic or idealistic, cynical or hopeful, positive or negative. While these have a certain descriptive power, the refer only to broad results of one's faith, not to the faith itself.

Our Unitarian and Universalist heritages are overwhelmingly positive or hopeful (even idealistic) in their tone or effect. That has changed some in the past three decades, when many of us (and I include myself) were discouraged by our relative ineffectiveness and by the lack of interest, even overt hostility, around us. One of our problems when discussing God, religion, or faith is a loss of some of this positive attitude within congregations and denomination -- a fatal flaw in our life. I am hopelessly optimistic, even in my most cynical moods, about our possibilities as a religious movement and what we stand for in the world.

Faith is the union of our dreams and our actions. But I am not going to talk about dreams and actions today. I am going to try to explain some aspect of each of these word-symbols. Action (or morality, or science, or society, or philosophy) depends upon knowledge. Dreams (or emotion, or poetry and art, or individual rights, or theology) are a form of love. Both these terms, knowledge and love, have venerable histories, and they are often contrasted and compared. I am more interested in seeing them as two sides of the same coin, as the yin and yang of faith, as interacting and changeable components of the same whole. I call the unity of knowledge and love faith.

Let's face it: not everyone in town thinks education, intelligence or knowledge is appropriate to faith. Some popular and even serious theological definitions of faith have contrasted faith with knowledge. One must become a fool for God, in Paul's words -- a phrase taken too seriously by some people. Many Christians are particularly fond of castigating education as the devil's workshop (the devil, it seems, has many workshops). Education is something artificial compared to God's simplicity. Education seems to lead to heresy, no matter how much one tries to control the curriculum. Fundamentalists especially suffer from ambivalent feelings about knowledge.

Love, on the other hand, would seem less controversial and more popular. Love is a term that most religious people, not just Christians, would accept as part of faith. Love has something to do with one's relationship to God and humanity. Love is emotional, direct, and yet vague enough to be finessed when needed. Love is poetry, not knowledge. Unlike science or facts, one can seldom say what love is, what its effects are, how one obtains it, or what one does with it—a theological term if ever there was one!

Yet love and knowledge should not be contrasted. Those who love foolishly are likely to be hurt, and with some justice. Naiveté has its limits, and there is something really quite offensive about the concept of "foolish love." Knowledge allows us to make reasoned or reasonable judgments, one of which may be to love; or maybe to shake hands, wash the dishes, or run like hell. Love is hardly the universally appropriate reaction to all life or all people or all situations. It is vastly over-rated by religion, and this is partly due to religion's difficulty with knowledge.

Knowledge is concerned with reality and reason. It helps us do things, accomplish purposes, create the world in concert with others. Knowledge helps us discriminate, as love helps us to ignore discrimination when it is not useful. Knowledge helps us recognize which forms of emotion and feeling and spirit are appropriate, while love helps us to marshal such feelings and express them, even under difficulties, oppression, and fear. Knowledge helps us to know what can be done and is being done.

Love, on the other hand, has little to do with reality or reason; it is relational, an expression of reliance. Love connects us with others; it forces us to recognize our need for other humans. In this way, it fills out (I could say, fleshes out) reality. Reality, science, society are impersonal, governed by laws and customs, concerned with progress and the future as practical goals. Love (art and poetry, the individual) is personal, governed by freedom and creativity, concerned less with the practical than with the ideal, the dream.

Alone both are flawed. Knoweledge, a cold rationality, is divorced from art and the individual, a horror. It is law without justice, peace without freedom, routine without pleasure. Love divorced from reason becomes a nightmare tyranny of charismatic leaders, emotionalism sweeping toward a chaotic storm, empty moral or spiritual form without content or concern for others. We are all susceptible to both currents of life, and even to both simultaneously. Yes, we may be both rational and emotional without integrating them into one whole. We might swing wildly from one to the other or schizophrenically combine them both, so that neither governs our life.

Ahhh, but what happens if you combine love and knowledge, if you look clearly at what is and dream glorious dreams about what may yet be? Love and knowledge together lead to faith, to a broadly positive view of human achievement and possibility, to a benign attitude about our planet and its fellow inhabitants, and to a dynamic view of justice, peace, and hope filling our lives with a glow, a spirit, a unique kind of freedom. This is what religion is all about. This is what inspires us to bring morality into our lives, to fill our moments with relations with others whom we consider dear and important, this is what motivates us to consider others when we make choices. This is what strengthens and encourages our daily living. This is faith.

Faith brings the wonder and awe in life down to my life. It humanizes what can be the otherwise awesome scale of life, the universe, and time. Faith makes sense of the connections we feel with all things, yet it does not lose that inestimably poetic feeling of oneness with the ALL. Faith unites us as neither love nor knowledge alone can. Faith brings us together with ourselves: our ability to think and do, and our ability to love and dream.

These notions are not at war, not contrasting opposites, but parts of the same Whole. When we speak of faith we often find ourselves unable to express this sense of the Whole that unites us with ourselves, others, and all that is. We humans have tended to call this God, or the gods, in recognition of its presence in every bit and piece of stuff we encounter. God it is, but that doesn't say much. The notion is kind of shorthand for the wondrous majesty of the universe and grandeur of humanity. God is a pronoun; it stands for a sense of the Whole composed of knowledge and love, reason and art.

This faith should bring us peace in time of confusion, rest in time of chaos, hope in times of trouble, comfort in times of oppression or limitation. But it cannot and should not do this at the expense of either knowledge or love. One should not find faith in a totalitarianism of Left or Right, not in a legalistic or bureaucratic organization, not in a society dominated by individual greed and self-interest, not in an organization based on the charisma of a prophet, no matter how near God, not in a time dominated by the past that never was and a future never to be. Faith is found today when we see God as a Whole, completing each of us and uniting us with all there is--a dream, but not an unrealistic or impossible dream.

Knowledge leads to progress, growth, and change. Love leads to stability, order, and home. Chaos and slavery characterize one without the other, but faith characterizes both. Faith balances the two in our lives and in our actions with others. Faith is the support that allows us to face uncertainty with the confidence that our skills can help us and the assurance that our friends will help us. Faith says that we are not alone, no matter how different a drummer we may follow at the moment, if we but continue to love and regard others with the same respect as we demand for ourselves. Harmony, congeniality, sensibility describe faith. So, too, does balance and wholeness and wonder. May your faith and that of this congregation and all Unitarian Universalists bring you a more abundant life of knowledge and love--faith that life requires action and the knowledge to guide those actions and that life requires love and the relationships with other people, animals, the environment, and the universe--even that yet to be--which give us hope.

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